What a lease actually includes
A lease bundles the lights, the install, in-season maintenance, takedown, and off-season storage into one seasonal price. The installer owns commercial-grade strands, sizes them to your roofline, and swaps any failures during the season, so a dark section gets fixed without a call from you. You are effectively renting a lit house on a schedule. The recurring cost is higher than owning, but nothing about storage, breakage, or re-measuring ever lands on you.
What buying your own really costs
Buying lowers the year-over-year price but shifts the burden. You store bulky strands somewhere dry for eleven months, you eat the cost of failures, and retail-grade lights often degrade after a couple of Chicago winters. If you still hire out the hang, you are paying labor on top of ownership; if you hang them yourself, you are back on a ladder at the second-story eave. Owning makes sense for handy homeowners with a stable display and storage space.
How to decide
Choose a lease if you value never handling the lights, want maintenance covered, or have a tall or complex roofline. Choose to buy if you have secure storage, a simple display you like, and the time and comfort to manage it. A useful middle path for owners who love the look but hate the hassle is permanent architectural lighting: a one-time install that removes both the annual hang and the storage problem entirely.